Quotes from Graham Greene

At the end of what is called the sexual life the only love which has lasted is the love which has everything, every disappointment, every failure and every betrayal, which has accepted even the sad fact that in the end there is no desire so deep as the simple desire for companionship.

I could have hated him for saying it: it was like a claim. If you really loved me, I thought, you'd behave like any other injured husband. You'd get angry and your anger would set me free.

trying to extricate from the long day the grain of pleasure

What have we all got to ecpect that we allow ourselves to be so line with disappointment.

When you're not a good man yourself you respect a good man. Now I'd prefer to die with a good man around. A good man teaches a lot of nonsense and a bad man teaches truth [...] I'm not the one to teach the boy nonsense.

But it wasn't the small Ministry to which Johns had referred, with limited aims like winning a war or changing a constitution. It was a Ministry as large as life to which all who loved belonged. If one loved one feared.

and I took her words as an insult and walked straight out and down the stairs and into the street. Is this the end, I wondered, playacting to myself? There's no need ever to go back. If I can get her out of my system, can't I find somewhere a quiet friendly marriage that would go on and on? Then perhaps I wouldn't feel jealous because I wouldn't love enough: I would just be secure, and my self-pity and hatred walked hand in hand across the darkening Common like idiots without a keeper.

Somebody always leaves a banana-skin on the scene of tragedy.

There are no coroners in Paraguay.

I had seen the flowers on her dress beside the canals in the north, she was indigenous like a herb, and I never wanted to go home.

friendship cannot stand humiliation.

what experience had taught him- that no human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another's happiness.

Ordinary life goes on - that has saved many a man's reason. Just as in an air-raid it proved impossible to be frightened all the time, so under the bombardment of routine jobs, or chance encounters, of impersonal anxieties, one lost for hours together the personal fear.

he forgot for the while what experience had taught him-that no human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another's happiness.

There was no scene, no tears, just thought — the long private thought of somebody who has to alter a whole course of life.

You think you are so bad,' she said, 'but it was only because you couldn't bear the pain. But they can bear pain - other people's pain - endlessly. They are the people who don't care.

Oh, and there was pride, of course. It takes a long time before we cease to feel proud of being wanted. Though God knows why we should feel it, when we look around and see who is wanted too.

A writer's knowledge of himself, realistic and unromantic, is like a store of energy on which he must draw for a lifetime: one volt of it properly directed will bring a character to life.

You don't believe in Him, do you?' 'No.' 'Things to me wouldn't make sense without Him.' 'They don't make sense to me with him.

Age, Henry, may a little modify our emotions— it does not destroy them.

Even though my reason wanted the state of death, I was afraid like a virgin of the act. I would have liked death to come with due warning, so that I could prepare myself. For what? I didn't know, nor how, except by taking a look around at the little I would be leaving.

I laugh at anyone who spends so much time writing about what doesn't exist - mental concepts.

What distant ancestors had given me this stupid conscience? Surely they were free of it when they raped and killed m their palaeolithic world.

Wouldn't we all do better not trying to understand, accepting the fact that no human being will ever understand another, not a wife a husband, a lover a mistress, nor a parent a child? Perhaps that's why men have invented God -- a being capable of understanding. Perhaps if I wanted to be understood or to understand I would bam-boozle myself into belief, but I am a reporter; God exists only for leader-writers.